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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What did Richard Wright want to deprive white people of?
(a) The language of black culture.
(b) The consolation of tears.
(c) The power of voyeurism.
(d) The consolation of philosophy.

2. What is the role of slavery in the black idea of tradition?
(a) A footnote to the development of sub-Saharan civilizations.
(b) A chance to participate in the ongoing developments of modernism.
(c) The founding event.
(d) A trial and opportunity for redemption through suffering.

3. What do Jews and blacks fear from a discussion of the Holocaust and slavery?
(a) Confronting all the things that cannot be known.
(b) Loss of uniqueness.
(c) Remembering.
(d) The lack of evidence from their familial histories.

4. What did Richard Wright say was the core of modernization?
(a) Racial subordination.
(b) Slavery.
(c) Cheap energy.
(d) Technological exploitation of resources.

5. Who does Gilroy say DuBois was analyzing in The Souls of Black Folk?
(a) African blacks.
(b) American blacks.
(c) Post-slavery peoples.
(d) The black Atlantic.

6. What does Gilroy say slavery was sanctified by?
(a) God and reason.
(b) History.
(c) Force.
(d) Cultural superiority.

7. What does music allow black culture to do with this feeling?
(a) Escape it.
(b) Commercialize it.
(c) Repossess it.
(d) Deny it.

8. What kinds of frameworks was DuBois trying to look beyond?
(a) Relativist.
(b) Essentialist.
(c) Monotheist.
(d) Pluralist.

9. What term did James Weldon Johnson use for blacks in The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man?
(a) 'Schizophrenic'.
(b) 'Urban-cosmopolitan'.
(c) 'Dual personality'.
(d) 'King of the kingdom of culture'.

10. What does Gilroy say is the only way to deal with the history of slavery?
(a) To try to hide the past away.
(b) To live with what is in the present.
(c) To dig into the past to find a personal origin in it.
(d) To look it in the face.

11. When did Richard Wright believe the western consciousness began to break down according to Gilroy?
(a) With the beginning of the Renaissance.
(b) When religious understanding of the world collapsed.
(c) With the beginning of slavery.
(d) With the development of technology.

12. What does Gilroy say modernism relies on?
(a) A sense of progress, and a continuity with the past.
(b) A sense of time and a break with the past.
(c) A sense of transformation, and an evolution from the past.
(d) A sense of justice, and a development of political institutions.

13. The second mode of double consciousness portrays blacks as what?
(a) A home unto himself.
(b) Homeless.
(c) A prophecy of a homeland.
(d) Wandering for a time.

14. What does Gilroy associate racial traditions with?
(a) International modernism.
(b) Pre-modernity.
(c) Postmodernity.
(d) Syncretic modernity.

15. Where does Gilroy say Richard Wright's profundity came from?
(a) His access to African-American vernacular.
(b) His family.
(c) His region.
(d) His personal experience.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where did Richard Wright develop his ideas about race?

2. What distinction does Gilroy say Richard Wright was the first black writer to achieve?

3. What horrified Richard Wright in Gilroy's account?

4. What did blacks symbolize for Richard Wright?

5. Why has the analysis of Wright's work been impoverished according to Gilroy?

(see the answer keys)

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